An egocentric model of the relations among the opportunity to underreport,social norms,ethical beliefs,and underreporting behavior

A model of the relations among taxpayers’ opportunity, social norms, ethical beliefs, and tax compliance is proposed and tested using structural equation modeling. High opportunity taxpayers, who may personally benefit from evasion, judged evasion as less unethical than low opportunity taxpayers. High and low opportunity taxpayers judged social norms similarly. Further, ethical beliefs partially (fully) mediate the relation between opportunity (social norms) and underreporting. Implications from our study to tax compliance researchers and policy makers are discussed.     

Corporation Tax Asymmetries and Cartel Unity

This paper examines the impact of changing the extent to which tax losses are refunded to firms in a model of imperfect competition. It proposes a particular collusive equilibrium in a repeated oligopoly with homogeneous quantity-setting firms. The industry sustains tacit collusion by using credible and severe punishments of deviations. The analysis of the most collusive equilibrium with losses indicates that a tax policy which increases refunds reduces output, increases market price, and therefore strengthens tacit collusion. In addition, the policy increases government revenue. An increase in the corporation tax rate has similar effects.     

The Distributional Implications of Income Under‐Reporting in Hungary*

The ability and inclination of specific social groups to evade tax vary widely, and this leads to considerable variation in the actual tax burden on individuals with similar levels of income. Thus, ignoring tax evasion can be seriously misleading in terms of the distributive and fiscal effects of the tax system. This paper estimates the distributional implications of income tax evasion in Hungary, based on a random sample of the administrative tax records of nearly 230,000 individuals. Gross incomes declared in the administrative tax returns are compared with incomes stated in a nationally representative household budget survey. Our estimates show that the average rate of underreporting is 9–13 per cent, though this conceals a big difference between the self‐employed (who hide the greater part of their income) and employees. The estimates are likely to be lower bounds. These rates are used in a tax– benefit microsimulation model to calculate the fiscal and distributional implications of under‐reporting. Tax evasion reduces households' personal income tax payments by about 16–20 per cent. While the poverty rate increases only slightly, income inequality rises significantly, suggesting that high‐income households tend to evade tax proportionately more. Finally, we find that tax evasion largely reduces the progressivity of the tax system.     

Re-assessing the merits of measuring tax evasion through business surveys: an application of the crosswise model

Self-assessments by respondents in surveys are often the only available measure of tax evasion in developing countries at the microeconomic level. However, they suffer from the reluctance of respondents to reveal their own illicit behavior. This paper evaluates whether this weakness of self-assessments can at least partially be overcome through a novel questioning method, the crosswise model, which allows estimating the prevalence of tax evasion, but not identifying whether the individual respondent engages in tax evasion or not. Using evidence from Serbia, we show that crosswise model-based estimates of the share of firms which significantly underreport sales exceed those obtained from conventional methods by around 10 % points or more. With respect to wage underreporting to evade payroll tax and social security contributions, we do not find differences. These results appear to be robust to a number of modifications, and we explore various potential causes that lead to these results.     

Tax compliance in a social setting: The influence of social norms,trust in government,and perceived fairness on taxpayer compliance

Voluntary tax compliance is important for governments around the world as they try to manage budget deficits. Traditional methods to improve tax compliance, such as increased audits, can be costly to implement. The purpose of this study is to examine the influence that social factors have on individuals' tax compliance intentions. Results of a survey of 217 U.S. taxpayers found support for the influence of social factors on tax compliance. This research concludes that social norms influence compliance intentions indirectly through internalization as personal norms. Specifically, as the strength of social norms in favor of tax compliance increases, personal norms of tax compliance also increase, and this leads to a subsequent increase in compliance intentions. We also conclude that trust in government has a significant influence on both perceived fairness of the tax system and compliance decisions. This study adds to current tax research in two important ways. First, the results suggest that the influence of social norms on tax compliance is largely through internalization as personal norms. Second, to the best of our knowledge this is also the first tax compliance study in which perception of fairness is modeled as a function of trust rather than vice-versa. This research may help taxing authorities develop less costly and more effective strategies for increasing taxpayer compliance.     

Fighting Tax Evasion by Discouraging the Use of Cash?

We propose a bargaining model of tax evasion with a seller that offers a price discount to a buyer in exchange for a cash payment without a receipt, which allows tax evasion. We study the effect on evasion and government revenue of two policy instruments: a tax on cash withdrawals (TCW), which imposes a cost on the buyers who pay cash, and a tax rebate conditional on having the receipt. The tax rebate reduces evasion but it is costly if tax evasion is low. The TCW reduces evasion only if it is set at a sufficiently high rate, which must be higher the larger is the mass of cash users. We also show that the implementation of a TCW, which poses several challenges, is easier if the cost of cash hoarding is high.     

Corporate and personal income tax declarations

Decisions by firms and individuals on the extent of their tax payments have generally been treated as separate choices. Empirically, a positive relationship between corporate and personal income tax evasion can be observed. The theoretical analysis in this paper shows that a manager's decision on the firm's behaviour will be independent of his personal preferences if the gain from reducing corporate tax payments is certain, as in the case of tax avoidance. If, however, the firm evades taxes so that the manager's income depends on whether the firm's activities are detected or not, corporate and personal income tax evasion choices cannot be separated. Jel Code H 24 · H 25 · H 26     

Tax reform, the informal economy, and bank financing of capital formation

This paper develops a model that relates businesses’ entry into the underground economy to tax rates and the need to access the banking system. The model uses a dynamic approach in which both firms and banks optimize and in which the benefits to a firm of accessing the banking system are endogenous. A firm compares the return to capital with the marginal tax rate on capital income and uses the difference to determine how much of the tax to pay. At the same time, banks use a firm’s capital tax payments, combined with the capital tax rate to obtain an estimate of the firm’s minimum capital value. If the firm pays at least some taxes then it will have access to the banking system, which will allow it to finance investment. If the firm pays no taxes, then it cannot access the banks and cannot invest. We compare the equilibria resulting from tax compliance and tax evasion. We calibrate the model to a highly stylized version of the Russian economy, and analyze the effect of potential tax changes on the underground economy. We compute a dynamic equilibrium for our model, and note that it tracks the path of certain macroeconomic variables of the Russian economy (GDP, budget and trade balances, price level and interest rate) with some accuracy for the years 2001–2008. We are unable to track the underground economy, as this data is unobservable. We then carry out a series of counterfactual simulations, first asking if non-capital intensive firms have an incentive to evade taxes under existing value added tax rates. We find that they do, and that the incentive would have been greatly reduced if the value added tax rate had been selectively reduced for the non-capital intensive sectors. We then ask what the effect would be if the corporate tax rate were raised on capital intensive sectors. The simulations indicate that the capital intensive sectors would not increase their entry into the underground economy.     

Relationship between tax compliance internationally and selected determinants of tax morale

Tax compliance has been studied by analyzing the individual decision of a representative person between planning and evading taxes. A neglected aspect of tax compliance is the impact of a social contract on tax morale. Such implicit contract between the individual and the state guaranteeing a high level of economic freedom, effective competition laws, an important equity market and high moral norms, is hypothesized to have a positive impact on tax compliance. In this paper, empirical evidence based on data from 30 countries indicate that tax compliance internationally is positively related to the level of economic freedom, the level of importance of the equity market and the effectiveness of competition laws and high moral norms.     

The runaway taxpayer

In order to analyze the determinants of tax evasion, the existing literature on individual tax compliance typically takes a ‘prior-to-audit’ point of view. This paper focuses on a ‘post-audit, post-detection’—so far unexplored—framework, by investigating what happens after tax evasion has been discovered and noncompliant taxpayers are asked to pay their debts. We first develop a two-period dynamic model of individual choice, considering an individual that has been already audited and detected as tax evader, who knows that Tax Authorities are looking for her to cash the due amount. We derive the optimal decision of running away in order to avoid paying the bill, and show that the experience of a prior tax notice reduces the probability to behave as a scofflaw. We then exploit information on ‘post-audit, post-detection’ tax compliance provided by an Italian collection agency for the period 2004–2007 to empirically assess the relationship between prior tax notices and unlawful behavior. The evidence from alternative logit model specifications supports our theoretical prediction: successful tax notices are negatively correlated with the probability of running away.     

Tax Evasion, Risky Laundering, and Optimal Deterrence Policy

This paper extends the Allingham and Sandmo's (1972) model of income tax evasion to take account of laundering opportunities, allowing the taxpayer to determine not only the amount of actual income to declare but also the amount of undeclared income to launder. Laundering, aside of entailing direct costs, is assumed to be an unlawful activity, subject to the risk of detection and punishment. The tax authorities devote separate resource efforts to initial audits which may detect undeclared income that has not been laundered and to in-depth investigation which may detect undeclared income that has been laundered. The paper analyzes the effects of laundering incentives on evasion and derives guidelines for the optimal design of a joint evasion/laundering deterrence policy. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Taking the Long Way Home: U.S. Tax Evasion and Offshore Investments in U.S. Equity and Debt Markets

We empirically investigate one form of illegal investor‐level tax evasion and its effect on foreign portfolio investment. In particular, we examine a form of round‐tripping tax evasion in which U.S. individuals hide funds in entities located in offshore tax havens and then invest those funds in U.S. securities markets. Employing Becker's ( 1968 ) economic theory of crime, we identify the tax evasion component by examining how foreign portfolio investment varies with changes in the incentives to evade and the risks of detection. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical evidence of investor‐level tax evasion affecting cross‐border equity and debt investment.     

Taxpayers' Behavioural Responses and Measures of Tax Compliance ‘Gaps’: A Critique and a New Measure

The work of Feldstein (1995 and 1999) has stimulated substantial conceptual and empirical advances in economists' approaches to analysing taxpayers' behavioural responses to changes in tax rates. Meanwhile, a largely independent literature proposing and applying alternative measures of tax compliance has also developed in recent years, which has sought to provide tax agencies with tools to identify the extent of tax non‐compliance as a first step to designing policies to improve compliance. In this context, measures of ‘tax gaps’ – the difference between actual tax collected and the potential tax collection under full compliance with the tax code – have become the primary measures of tax non‐compliance via (legal) avoidance and/or (illegal) evasion. In this paper, we argue that the tax gap as conventionally defined is conceptually flawed because it fails to incorporate behavioural responses by taxpayers. We show that conventional tax gap measures, which ignore the presence of behavioural responses, exaggerate the degree of non‐compliance. This potentially applies both to indirect taxes (such as the ‘VAT gap’) and direct (income) taxes. Further, where these conventional tax gap measures motivate reforms designed to increase the tax compliance rate, they will likely have a tax‐base‐reducing effect and hence generate a smaller increase in realised tax revenues than would be anticipated from the tax gap estimate.     

An evasive topic: theorizing about the hidden economy

This paper reviews some central issues that arise in theorizing about tax evasion decisions and the hidden economy. It starts from the Allingham and Sandmo (J. Public Econ. 1:323–338, 1972) modeling of the tax evasion decision as a choice under uncertainty based on expected utility maximization and risk aversion. It goes on to discuss alternative specifications of the taxpayer’s preferences with particular regard to the explanation of the extensive margin, i.e. the decision on whether or not to engage in tax evasion. It extends the model to the case of variable labor supply with work in both official and black labor markets. It then considers the application of the theory to taxes on wealth and income from capital, indirect tax evasion, and smuggling. It also includes a consideration of general equilibrium effects and of the problems that evasion causes for the theory of optimal income and commodity taxes. It concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of tax evasion for economic policy in the welfare state.     

Reporting import tariffs (and other taxes)

This paper derives the implications for compliance and fiscal revenues of a tax base that is the product of several factors. For instance, in the case of import tariffs, the tax base is the product of quantity and unit value, both reported to, and during an audit assessed by, the custom authority. Import tariffs are particularly interesting as custom receipts represent an important share of government revenues in many developing countries and there has recently been a surge in empirical studies showing how evasion in this field is a pervasive phenomenon. I show that, with a multiplicative tax base, when the fiscal authority has an imperfect detection technology a greater declaration in one dimension actually increases the fine when evasion in the other dimension is detected. Therefore, there is an additional incentive for the taxpayer to underdeclare and a multiplicative tax base is subject to more evasion, compared to a tax base that can be assessed directly. As a result, fiscal revenues decrease with the dimensionality of the tax base. Also, voluntary compliance and fiscal revenues may be higher when the importer is required to declare only the total value of imports instead of quantity and unit value separately. This paper provides an argument in favour of uniform or specific tariffs and a reason for why a flat tax may improve compliance.     

The relationship between culture and tax evasion across countries: Additional evidence and extensions

This study builds on the work of Tsakumis et al. [Tsakumis, G. T., Curatola, A. P,. & Porcano, T. M. (2007). The relation between national cultural dimensions and tax evasion. Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation, 16, 131-147] by conducting further empirical analysis of the relationship between Hofstede's [Hofstede, G. H. (1980). Cultures consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications] cultural dimensions and tax evasion across countries using multiple measures of tax evasion to gain additional evidence on the subject. Moreover, this study extends the preliminary international tax evasion model developed by Tsakumis et al. [Tsakumis, G. T., Curatola, A. P,. & Porcano, T. M. (2007). The relation between national cultural dimensions and tax evasion. Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation, 16, 131-147] to examine, along with culture, the impact of legal, political, and religious variables on tax evasion across countries. Based on data from 47 countries, and after controlling for economic development, the regression results indicate that the higher the level of uncertainty avoidance and the lower the level of individualism, legal enforcement, trust in government, and religiosity, the higher is the level of tax evasion across countries. These findings remain robust to multiple measures of tax evasion. Government policymakers should find the results of this study useful in assessing the likelihood of tax evasion from cultural, legal, political, and religious perspectives, and in developing tax reform policies to reduce tax evasion.     

Evidence of the invisible: toward a credibility revolution in the empirical analysis of tax evasion and the informal economy

Empirical research about tax evasion and the informal economy has exploded in the past few decades, seeking to shed light on the magnitude and (especially policy) determinants of these phenomena. Quantitative information informs the analysis of policy choices, enables the testing of hypotheses about determinants of this phenomenon, and can help with the accurate construction of national income accounts. Even as empirical analysis has burgeoned, some have expressed doubts about the quality and usefulness of some prominent measures. The fact that high-quality data is elusive is neither surprising nor a coincidence. The defining characteristic of tax evasion and informal economic activity—that they are generally illegal—often renders unreliable standard data collection methods such as surveys. Unlike invisible phenomena in the natural sciences, these invisible social science phenomena are hard to measure because of choices made by individuals. Analysis of tax evasion and the informal economy must proceed even in the absence of the direct observability of key variables, and theory should guide the construction and interpretation of evidence of the “invisible.” In this paper, we address what can be learned using micro or macro data regarding tax evasion and the informal economy under given conditions and assumptions, and critically review some of the most common empirical methods in light of our conclusions. We conclude with an entreaty for researchers in this field to enlist in the “credibility revolution” (Angrist and Pischke in J. Econ. Perspect. 4(2):3–30, 2010) in applied econometrics.     

Destination taxation and evasion: Evidence from U.S. inter-state commodity flows

Tax evasion has been an important issue in the accounting literature for several decades, but the focus has been on corporate income taxes. We develop a new way to examine tax evasion that focuses on corporate transactions, rather than corporate profits. Specifically, we examine how commodity flows respond to destination sales taxes, allowing for tax evasion as a function of distance between trade partners. After accounting for transportation costs, we find that the effect of taxes decreases as distance increases. This is consistent with the notion that longer distances between trade partners hinder government oversight and increase the likelihood of successful tax evasion. Our results are robust with respect to outliers, strategic neighbor effects, information sharing agreements and other re-specifications. These results are important to policymakers because they evidence the difficulty of enforcing destination taxation in open economies such as U.S. states and the European Union.     

论对个人财产转移信托的课税

随着信托业务的不断发展,以财产保护和转移为目标的财产转移信托在我国已经出现。财产转移信托具有特殊的财产权架构,因而导致其税收法律关系出现较为复杂的变化。由于我国尚未建立财产转移信托税收制度,信托税收法律关系的变化将产生不利于社会公平、不利于防范避税等一系列负面问题。本文认为,我国应当按照信托受益人课税和信托主体课税的原则构建相关信托税收制度。     

Unraveling the political budget cycle nexus in Greece

This paper studies whether the Greek budget deficit is systematically affected by changes of government in the context of two political parties alternating in office. We advance the existing literature by constructing a tax evasion variable specific to the Greek economy and incorporating into our models. Testing the impact of each party upon the budget deficit during election and non-election years in the presence of tax evasion, we find a strong and persistent relationship between them independently of party political ideology. We assert that our finding constitutes a stylized fact of the Greek drama. Our results suggest that tax evasion together with the incident of two political parties alternating in office have tended to exacerbate the Greek government budget deficit accounting for about half the variation in it over the period examined. Moreover, GDP growth is found to exert a mitigating and permanent effect on budget deficit fluctuation.